Google Inc.

Jakub Konecny

Hugh Brendan McMahan

Blaise Hilary Aguera-Arcas

Daniel Ramage

Xinnan Yu

Eider Brantly Moore

Dave Morris Bacon

Sanjiv Kumar

Manzil Zaheer

Sashank Jakkam Reddi

John Keith Rush

Zachary Alan Garrett

Eider Brantley Moore

Zachary Burr Charles

A computing system and method can be used to implement a version of federated learning (FL) that incorporates adaptivity (e.g., leverages an adaptive learning rate). In particular, the present disclosure provides a general optimization framework in which (1) clients perform multiple epochs of training using a client optimizer to minimize loss on their local data and (2) a server system updates its global model by applying a gradient-based server optimizer to the average of the clients' model updates. This framework can seamlessly incorporate adaptivity by using adaptive optimizers as client and/or server optimizers. Building upon this general framework, the present disclosure also provides example specific adaptive optimization techniques for FL which use per-coordinate methods as server optimizers. By focusing on adaptive server optimization, the use of adaptive learning rates is enabled without increase in client storage or communication costs and compatibility with cross-device FL can be ensured.

Federated learning with adaptive optimization

The present disclosure provides efficient communication techniques for transmission of model updates within a machine learning framework, such as, for example, a federated learning framework in which a high-quality centralized model is trained on training data distributed overt a large number of clients each with unreliable network connections and low computational power. In an example federated learning setting, in each of a plurality of rounds, each client independently updates the model based on its local data and communicates the updated model back to the server, where all the client-side updates are used to update a global model. The present disclosure provides systems and methods that reduce communication costs. In particular, the present disclosure provides at least: structured update approaches in which the model update is restricted to be small and sketched update approaches in which the model update is compressed before sending to the server.

Communication efficient federated learning

Systems and methods of determining a global model are provided. In particular, one or more local updates can be received from a plurality of user devices. Each local update can be determined by the respective user device based at least in part on one or more data examples stored on the user device. The one or more data examples stored on the plurality of user devices are distributed on an uneven basis, such that no user device includes a representative sample of the overall distribution of data examples. The local updates can then be aggregated to determine a global model.

Systems and methods of distributed optimization

Growing community of inventors

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Jakub Konecny